id3 (metadata) frustration

[Russell Landwehr]

I've spent two days now looking for a good id3 editor. (I would prefer a free one for PC.)

Every one of them is different.

Some tags edited in one won't show up in another. Some tags are unavailable in some and available in others.

iTunes, Winamp, Kid3, MP3tag, right-click properties, ID3 Tag Editor, etc. ad infinitum, on and on, ad nauseum... arrrrrgh!

I've searched the forum and checked out the suggestions and links.

And found myself back to using "right-click properties in Windows Explorer."

GEEZ!

rant over

rl

[Casey H]

I think the Windows Explorer method is as good as any.... Usually the title, artist, album and/or album artist show up in most common players such as WMA or iTunes...

Not an expert here.

Casey

[eeoo]

Never had a problem with i-tunes, what does it not do that you want it to do?

eo

[Russell Landwehr]

iTunes doesn't have Description, Publisher, Keywords, Featured Instruments, Mood.

[Casey H]

iTunes doesn't have Description, Publisher, Keywords, Featured Instruments, Mood.

I don't think tags other than the main ones such as title, artist, album are handled the same way across different players. If you tag an mp3 with iTunes, I would assume that if another person plays it in iTunes, they would see all the tags you entered as you did. But if they played the mp3 in WMA, maybe not.

A lot of libraries uses spreadsheets outside of the music files for this info.

Are you doing this for a library or just so your mp3 files have as much info as possible?

Casey

[Russell Landwehr]

So far the bare-bones info is good enough: Performer, Composer, Title, Comments, BPM, Genre, email (in the "album" field is a good idea, thanks Casey Feb/2012), So right-clicking in Windows does the trick. However, I like to think/plan ahead and be prepared for those thousands of library placements that will be coming my way soon
With my increased focus and productivity, I want to stay organized so things don't get out of hand forcing me to play administrative-catch-up later. The "you-don't-need-to-think-about-that-yet" stance has never been my modus operandi. I always have in mind the full (ever-changing) picture.

But, should I surmise from your post that the metadata I include now will need to be updated later anyway depending on the library?

[eeoo]

In my experience every publisher is different as far as what they want for metadata. I don't think there is any way of making your cues future proof. Most publishers I work with use spreadsheets anyway. Plus if you're submitting .wav files you can't tag them anyway, at least to my knowledge. I work with one publisher that prefers aiff files because you can tag them but the info he wants is very basic and easily doable in i-tunes.

[Kolstad]

No solution from me, other than to add a couple to the experimental list.
Haven't tried them yet, as I'm as desperate as anyone:

MusicBee
http://getmusicbee.com/features.html

Tagscanner
http://www.xdlab.ru/en/

[mazz]

As far as I know, there's currently no standard format for MetaData in audio files. I know of one publisher I work with that wants us to use iTunes to put in the MetaData and even has a procedure for how he likes it. Other publishers use the SoundMiner format and they provide a spreadsheet (Excel) with all the required fields mapped out which gets imported into SoundMiner once they get the spreadsheet. Still other publishers just want you to tell them what the bpm is in the title of the piece and they fill in the rest, and so forth.

IMO the most important time to have Metadata in an audio file is for mp3s for demo submissions and for posting on websites for download.

The rest of the time, I suggest you wait for a publisher to tell you what to do.

[Kolstad]

Yeah, the basic issue is that wav's can't be tagged. You need to have the wav. file wrapped in some way. That's what all of these programmes are doing. There's no universal way to do it, because of this.

iTunes does seem to embed metadata into AIFF, though, but still basically works as a wrapper. So, each supervisor/ publisher have to choose their preferred format (wrapper) first, for you to comply with their standard afterwards. That's the sequence.